Merkel perfects plumber’s guide to power
Put aside grand visions, soaring rhetoric or deep explanations for the unruly forces of our times. As Angela Merkel tells it, the secret to winning elections is found in the parable of the humble domestic plumber.
The householder with a broken dishwasher, the German chancellor has been heard to say, does not want long accounts or exhaustive diagrams of the technicalities. What they require is a tradesperson who can be trusted to fix the machine. So in plumbing, so in politics.
Voters are uninterested in policy prescriptions or the theory of geopolitics. They want a leader they can be confident will put things right.
There are many explanations for the angry populism that has upended the old order in many rich democracies — some are economic, some social, some cultural. The common denominator is a collapse of faith in the elites.
Donald Trump presented Americans with a wholly false prospectus. Britain’s Brexiters lied and then lied again about the EU. Many supporters, one suspects, were conscious of the mendacity. But had the old guard shown itself to be any more trustworthy?
Merkel’s election campaign has been a lesson in the positive power of trust. The chancellor has not been shy about promoting her experience as a seasoned stateswoman in an ever more dangerous world. Nor about mentioning the buoyant German economy.
By and large, Germans are living well. They have their problems — for some reason the best engineers in the world cannot build simple things such as airports — but, thus far, the society has been spared the great cleavages, economic and social, that are fracturing other democracies.
And yet Germans cannot forever escape the consequences of disorder elsewhere. Trump has kicked away an essential pillar of German security. His disdain for liberal values and rejection of the postwar western order defies Berlin’s attachment to a system of international relations grounded in rules rather than brute power.
The US president’s every appearance on television screens is another reason to back Merkel. In 2015, she came close to losing the people’s trust. Her decision to open the borders to refugees fleeing the war in Syria marked a rare occasion when the chancellor elevated personal conviction over studied pragmatism.
It nearly all went wrong. A majority of Germans voiced pride in her defence of the liberal values that have been embedded in the nation’s postwar psyche.
But they also feared they would be overwhelmed.
Two years on, the migrant tide has been reduced to a smallish stream and the nation’s bureaucracy has re-established its grip. Everywhere you go, officials, politicians and leaders of civil society bustle around promoting the integration of the incomers.
Merkel insists she has nothing to apologise for. She is right. Closing the borders would have shamed Germany and invited a humanitarian catastrophe in the Balkans. Yet, it was the same Merkel who then struck a tawdry deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Berlin agreed to pay Erdogan to lock up the refugees in Turkey — an arrangement that has so far survived myriad of separate disputes between the two countries. The moral here perhaps is that leaders can be idealists on Mondays as long as they promise to be realists on Tuesdays.
Not everyone is sanguine about integrating the hundreds of thousands of refugees who arrived before Turkey closed the gates. Alternative for Germany, a party of the xenophobic far right, more than doubled its support to 13%. For Germans still living with the demons of Nazism, the presence in the federal parliament of a party preaching ugly nativism will be a shock.
The big question that has gone unanswered is what Merkel intends to do with her victory. Her fourth term must surely be her last. Her thoughts must turn to legacy. And yet those who have worked with her confirm that she is fixed in her preference for plumbing over vision.
Caution has served her well. Her predecessor and one-time mentor Helmut Kohl would have been gripped by the opportunity to take another leap towards European unity. Merkel recognises the importance of Europe to Germany’s national interest, but her approach is instrumental.
Perhaps the chancellor is the definition of Germany’s problem. It is a country that has learnt the worth of civility, reason and law. It lives by rules; decent rules. It has prospered as a consequence.
But all the while Germany struggles to understand why it need be any more than a passive beneficiary of what, pre-Trump, was called the Pax Americana.
Fixing the dishwasher is not much use if the kitchen roof is about to fall in.
On the other hand, we should not be too tough on Merkel. To say that Germany has a problem is only to highlight how bad things have become elsewhere. /The Financial Times Limited 2017(c)
THE BIG QUESTION THAT HAS GONE UNANSWERED IS WHAT MERKEL INTENDS TO DO WITH HER VICTORY. HER FOURTH TERM MUST SURELY BE HER LAST